Nagin Administration delays spending AIDS grants

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's administration dedicates seven employees to distributing $7 million in federal HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention grants, but it still took them more than half a year to give the money to agencies that treat more than 4,000 infected people, a delay that irked City Council members Thursday.

Testifying before the council's Housing and Human Needs Committee, Fran Lawless, director of the mayor's Office of Health Policy, said the city received the $7 million March 1 but didn't send out grant award notices to medical case management agencies until June and didn't finalize contracts, which are required for money to be spent, until this month.

The money comes from the federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, named for an Indiana teenager whose public struggle with AIDS in the 1980s and eventual death in 1990 brought awareness of the disease into the mainstream.

Council committee Chairman Arnie Fielkow blistered Lawless with questions, asking, "Don't we wipe out small service providers who are serving the most needy of the community?" and "Why does it take that long? We're not dealing with a pothole here. We're dealing with life."

Lawless said, "Contracts are a two-way street, " claiming that some agencies were slow to file spending invoices. But Fielkow said it shouldn't have taken four months after securing the funding to begin the contract negotiations.

Lawless blamed "implementation problems" for the long contracting process and promised that "it will flow better from now on."

But she seemed reluctant to accept council members' suggestions that grant applications be reviewed before the annual federal funding is announced each March. Lawless also couldn't say when next year's funding would be available, saying that her staff members only "sit in on the review" of grant applications and must defer to the city's chief administrative office in making final selections. She said an executive order by Nagin essentially took the decisions out of her hands.

That disturbed David Munroe, chairman of the board of the agency In This Together, which shut its doors during the summer after spending $120,000 from other sources, including its founders' personal money, to keep serving its 225 patients.

"The executive order has the review in the CAO's office, with people who don't know what's going on in the community, " he said. Meanwhile, "$1 million in administrative funding for 12 grants is a huge amount, " and taking several months "to get grants on the street with seven people is absolutely ridiculous."

Munroe said the number of HIV/AIDS cases in New Orleans is on the rise, particularly among indigent residents who most need help.

Councilwoman Stacy Head said she was astounded by the ratio of city employees to grant dollars in Lawless' office.

"We have departments with much larger budgets operating with two to three people, " she said.

The city lost its Ryan White grants entirely during Mayor Marc Morial's administration because it failed to submit its application to the federal Department of Health and Human Services on time, Lawless said. She said she's hoping to change the city's contracting process to allow multiple-year agreements with service providers so their funding isn't cut off every March.

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David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3322.